DpOscars 1.0A discussion about Tom Gaines' plugin
Cinematic Collection Viewer planted an idea in my head. I didn't actually look at Tom's plugin, because I wanted to take an unbiased look at the Academy Awards (aka Oscars). Primarily I wanted to be able to find out which movies in my collection that had some kind of Oscar nominations (including wins, of course). And this program grew from that.
You can search for a movie, and see what nominations it had received:
You can search for a person and see what nominations that person had received:
(Isn't it a f***ing scandal that Thelma Ritter was nominated 6 times and never won Best Supporting Actress?)And, most importantly (for me), you can load your exported collection and find out which of your movies had received nominations:
There is a gotcha here, though. A profile must have the nominated title either as its main Title or its Original title. And it must be spelled the same (not shift sensitive, though). So, for example, "First" and "1st" won't match. And the program won't realize that "Jungfrukällan" in my collection is a Best International Feature Film winner, since the name ("The Virgin Spring") doesn't appear in my Swedish profile.
The spelling also matters for the person search, and unfortunately the source that I base my database on isn't always consistent. So, for example, "L.B. Abbott" and "L. B. Abbott" are treated as two different persons. Does that problem seem familiar? Well, it's not too great a problem here, I think, but you should be aware of it when searching for people.
On that note, I should mention "Contains" vs. "Specified". The movie and person searches are done using SQLite SELECT statements, and SQL has two wildcard characters. Percent ( % ) and underscore ( _ ). Percent matches zero or more characters, and underscore matches exactly one character.
So, if you check
Specified, "Wild%" will match any title that starts with that word, "%Wild" will match any that ends with it, "%Wild%" will match any that contains the word, and finally "Wild" will only match that exact title.
On the other hand if you check
Contains then enter "Wild", it will internally be changed to "%Wild%", just for convenience.
You can use percent it inside a string as well, so for example "L%Abbott" will find both "L.B. Abbott" and "L. B. Abbott".
The underscore is perhaps less useful, but can come in handy in some cases. Search for "_._.%" and you'll find any names that start with two initials without any space between, like "L.B. Abbott".
Apart from that, this program doesn't have any bells and whistles. So double-clicking rows won't do anything. The database goes up to the production year 2023 (Awards presented in 2024), so this years awards are not included.